I can see announcing new releases, though I think slashdot goes overboard on that, but announcing RUMORS of a possible release?
Well, after I submitted the story, I kept hunting around for more info, and found what is probably the origin of the Mandrake 8.2 rumor: a mailing list post by someone at Mandrake. I'm not on the mailing list, but I did find a Usenet discussion about it at Google. I guess the rumor probably has some validity, so Slashdot's probably right on the money at this point. Although, to be honest, I kinda hope it isn't released on Monday -- that Usenet discussion and a few others I've read make it clear that while this release is solid, it's getting rushed out the door, probably because of money issues.
Hey Mandrake, if you really need money coming in, take pre-orders and spend an extra week to kill off a few extra bugs. I'll buy it & take a charge to my card now, but just deliver on the stability rumor. I'll pay for stability.
Blizzard CAN NOT create legal policy; nor can any other corporation. They are not lawmakers; they can not decide to declare something illegal because it presses upon their revenue stream.
I hope Mandrake has a long and successful future, and if you are using Mandrake now - how much time has it saved you?
Well, Mandrake 8.0 was so buggy that it probably ended up costing me more in lost productivity than it saved. I switched to SuSE 7.3, which is what I'm posting from right now. SuSE has been, at least for me, a more stable OS, and nearly as user-friendly as Mandrake. In fact, I think YAST 2 is a far better install/update system than anything Mandrake has put out so far. So what do I do? Reward a company that didn't compete very well? I just don't know if I can do that. I could bring myself to pre-order 8.2. I haven't seen that offered yet. I guess I always thought that part of the attraction of Open Source was the competition: anyone can throw their hat into the ring, and the best solutions will win. Perhaps Mandrake isn't the best solution.
Aw hell. I'm going to go recheck for an 8.2 pre-order form. At least then my dollars will be going to something more like a marketplace than a charity.
And what the heck happened to all the cash that came in from their stock offering? Did they burn it off already? Geeze! Mandrake is going to lose out for having a more unstable product and poor financial planners. I'm not optimistic.
The first time that a court in somewhere like China tries to enforce a ruling on a US citizen they will claim protection under some clause of the US constitution and nothing will happen. Perhaps I'm just an old cynic.
No, you're not a cynic, you're realistic. As a US citizen, even I find this to be bad policy. It will be biased in favor of the USA, and while my government officials may find that wonderful, it's going to result in long-term anti-US sentiment. Afghanistan will be the least of our worries. Not to mention that countries are soverign! Why would they put up with such disrespect?
A system that would allow me to contribute small amounts to other people's accounts would be nice too.
Well that's a good idea. I am a "fan" of about 10 posters here on slashdot, and I would drop a buck into each of their buckets, if I could. In fact, I am more inclined to give each of them a buck than I am to pay out $5 for myself.
Also, it would be easy and useful for slashdot to use Amazon's donation system. It's a lot like PayPal, but Amazon takes about 10% more or less than PayPal does (I can't recall the rate off the top of my head). I'm waiting for that, as I don't use PayPal.
No, what they are saying is that they paid for the development of IE and don't want to be forced to give away their intellectual property. They don't want there to be a Linux version because the availability of IE in Windows gives them a market advantage over Linux.
Isn't that called tying? Is that illegal for a convicted monopolist to do? If they're really saying what you suggested, then haven't they just admitted to breaking the law and wanting to continue breaking the law?
I also suggest that you get an EFF membership to help them fight cases
like this. If you want to donate to a defense fund for our court costs I would
assume that you could contact EFF and they could work something out.
I have just donated another $100 to the EFF. I hope some slashdot readers will join me. There is a link in my sig.
Well, since we're talking about chillingeffects.org, it seems appropriate to quote their FAQ:
The purpose of copyright law is to encourage creative work by granting a temporary monopoly in an author's original creations. This monopoly takes the form of six rights in areas where the author retains exclusive control. These rights are:
the right of reproduction (i.e., copying),
the right to create derivative works,
the right to distribution
...and it goes on from there. But it looks pretty clear to me that these legal experts suggest that copyright infringement steals at least the right of reproduction, if not the right to distribution as well. So you may not like the word theft, but I think it was fine for the original post to use that term.
How many people are using Linux **right now** as they view this page.
That may not be a fair question. I'm viewing this on my lunch break at work, and the company has standardized on Windows. But my home is full of Linux & Mac computers. I spent last night using my SuSE 7.3 box: I downloaded skins for XMMS, I surfed to mp3.com and slashdot.org using Mozilla, and played a game of Risk. So what should slashdot count as my "real" computer? My "lunch break" computer or my home computer?
Their shareholders probably wouldn't notice if blizzard just ceased to exist alltogether.
The original comment said that the shareholders will force Blizzard to pursue the DMCA strongarm tactics. I then said that shareholders care about losses from boycotts, so your counter is to suggest that shareholders won't even notice Blizzard's collapse. Which is it? Are they so involved as to force Blizzard's hand or so uninvolved to not care if Blizzard is boycotted out of existence?
Slashdot is media. And it is playing an increasingly powerful role -- you're free to slouch on the sidelines and not participate, but don't expect everyone to come sit and pout with you.
You mean, slashdot's collective ability to protest and cause change was a fluke? What about slashdot's notice that prompted people to write all those letters? There are other situations where slashdot was either a contributing factor in a change, or was the direct cause. Fresh in my memory are other recent things, such as the MySQL debacle and an incident where a company resold modified GPL code without releasing the patches. A quick search through slashdot's own history would show that slashdot has a ripple effect -- it may only be 3000 people that take the boycott plunge, but they'll tell their friends, and maybe get a Web site or 20 to write about it.
Slashdot has become quite effective at making people aware of issues. This seems to have slipped right under the radar of the slashdot readers themselves! We've been bemoaning how we're "just a bunch of geeks" for so long, that we haven't even realized yet that we're now quite a powerful bunch of geeks.
So: when you see Warcraft III on the shelves, don't buy it.
Unfortunately your recommendation lacks insight into the real problem. They may have shareholders that have the power to overthrow you if you don't use your corporate legal power to it's greatest extent.
Hmmm. Well, the shareholders I've known over the years have been extremely sensitive to market pressures. If your company is being boycotted, it is very rare that shareholders shrug their shoulders and say, "sorry, the law exists, we're gonna keep doing it, because we can." Hell, even Adobe gave in to pressure over the Dmitry incident. I think qslack is onto something with his/her suggestion to boycott. Losing money is a very imporant topic to shareholders, and if they lose because we had our acts together enough to boycott, they'll abandon their DMCA pursuits quickly. Again, this is only based upon my experience. But I think qslack is right.
Good God. Look at my subject. What a horrible, horrible subject I used. I apologize -- I put "foo" in as a placeholder subject so I could do a preview, and then forgot to change it. I in no way meant it to be "oh foo on Debian" in the grinchy sense. Damn. That probably just painted my entire comment in a light that I did not intend.
Expected major upgrades, by the time woody releases, include GLibC 2.2, GCC 3.0, XFree86 4.1 and Perl 5.6. Linux kernel 2.4 is judged not to be mature enough to be a default for most architectures at this time, but you can install a 2.4 kernel from Debian after completing your installation. It's also likely that the debconf package will be used in nearly all the packages which need to prompt in the maintainer scripts.
I think Debian needs a 2.4 kernel as the default if Debian is going to shake its image as hopelessly outdated. For instance, even now you can apt-get up-to-date packages, but most people don't go beyond the defaults. As for me, I go beyond a little: I like to get security patches. Love those. But I'm wary of upgrading other things -- I've tried a KDE 2.1 to 2.2 upgrade that really made my system screwy, and a SuSE 2.4.10 kernel upgrade to 2.4.14 that lost my ext3 functionality. Of course I fixed these things, but I'm wary now. It took time, which is valuable to me. Even with Debian, you can apt-get yourself into trouble. So as someone on the sidelines (well, maybe more than that, I've done a lot of Debian installs), I would encourage the Debian folks to either reconsider the default install, or actively plan for a 3.1 (or even 3.0.1) release that will happen soon after 3.0.
It's not like writing less bloated code is a bad thing. Crapping out code that does stuff is not hard. If Linux was just a bunch of bloatware kludged together to barely work, it would require a lot less effort.
I think you're right. Trying to work with an old 486 or Pentium 1 with 16 megs of RAM will illustrate your coding weaknesses very quickly. It'll make you pull out unnecessary loops, pull out arrays held in memory needlessly, find better/faster algorithms, and so on. We had an app that did a sloppy recursive database query and it took 20 seconds even on fast servers. Switching to a join required some hard thought from 3 people about how to get it right, but the response time now is nearly instantaneous. Maybe one-tenth of a second. And anyone who has played with Perl knows that foreach will read a file into memory, bogging down the system if it has to swap, but using "while" will fix the problem. Simple coding fixes are possible and can give very real, visible speedups. I don't believe that bloat is necessary -- often it is just the result of a developer doing it the obvious way instead of the way that requires someone to sit down & mull it over for 30 minutes.
And don't forget that the Unix way -- one of the catch-phrases that attacted me to the platform -- is "small tools dedicated to single jobs." We're different from Windows in that regard, and that's good. It's attracts people to the platform.
Also in the "works on small/old computers" topic, both SuSE and Mandrake seem to have some activity in this area. It's nice to see them listening to customers a little bit. I buy their boxed products, and really, really want them to speed up & shrink down. Check out my Usenet post about installing SuSE 7.3 on a 32 meg Pentium 1 (summary: it hurts, but it's possible). And for Mandrake, check out this Slashdot article about Mandrake's upcoming super-super-minimal install.
This kind of stuff is near & dear to my heart -- I have spent hours upon hours trying to squeeze installs onto old 486 laptops, mostly. Partly I wanted to learn Linux, but mostly I was just indignant that Windows would install & run okay, so I got very interested in making Linux compete. If you get any Linux working on old boxes, please please please document it somewhere that Google will find you. I'm constantly searching Usenet & the Web for other people's installation experiences.
There are a couple ways to get a modern Linux on your old 386 right now, although getting Red Hat to de-bloat would be very cool. I still use 6.2 on some old laptops because it was a nice, stable release, sorta modern apps, and works fine with 16 megs of RAM. But also look at Vector Linux, which has a 386 & 486 optimized distro with a 2.4 kernel & lots of small recent apps. You can get it on CD too. And also Small Linux, which will run in console mode in as little as 2 megs of RAM, and will do X-Windows with just 4 megs of RAM. The Small Linux kernel is only 2.0, though. But it's very cool to give someone an old 386 laptop with a Web browser, basically restored to some minimal usefulness.
By the way, if you check out Small Linux, you may notice that the home page talks about a.75 release. But you'll find a.81 release available for download. It's definitely improving (my first try with this distro & it just wouldn't even work, but now it actually runs if you're able to follow the instructions carefully).
But should packaging a tightly integrated web browser with the user interface illegal?
You've just defined "tying" which is illegal for a company with a monopoly to do. Since Microsoft has actually been found guilty now, I think the answer to your question is not only yes it should be illegal (in theory), but also yes it is illegal (according to the court ruling).
Slashdot Mirror
Well, after I submitted the story, I kept hunting around for more info, and found what is probably the origin of the Mandrake 8.2 rumor: a mailing list post by someone at Mandrake. I'm not on the mailing list, but I did find a Usenet discussion about it at Google. I guess the rumor probably has some validity, so Slashdot's probably right on the money at this point. Although, to be honest, I kinda hope it isn't released on Monday -- that Usenet discussion and a few others I've read make it clear that while this release is solid, it's getting rushed out the door, probably because of money issues.
Hey Mandrake, if you really need money coming in, take pre-orders and spend an extra week to kill off a few extra bugs. I'll buy it & take a charge to my card now, but just deliver on the stability rumor. I'll pay for stability.
Hey! Stop posting on slashdot and get back to work, like the rest of us! Uh, oh, wait....
(mr edrugtrader is my employee :)
Tell that to Disney & the RIAA, mmmmkay?
Well, Mandrake 8.0 was so buggy that it probably ended up costing me more in lost productivity than it saved. I switched to SuSE 7.3, which is what I'm posting from right now. SuSE has been, at least for me, a more stable OS, and nearly as user-friendly as Mandrake. In fact, I think YAST 2 is a far better install/update system than anything Mandrake has put out so far. So what do I do? Reward a company that didn't compete very well? I just don't know if I can do that. I could bring myself to pre-order 8.2. I haven't seen that offered yet. I guess I always thought that part of the attraction of Open Source was the competition: anyone can throw their hat into the ring, and the best solutions will win. Perhaps Mandrake isn't the best solution.
Aw hell. I'm going to go recheck for an 8.2 pre-order form. At least then my dollars will be going to something more like a marketplace than a charity.
And what the heck happened to all the cash that came in from their stock offering? Did they burn it off already? Geeze! Mandrake is going to lose out for having a more unstable product and poor financial planners. I'm not optimistic.
No, you're not a cynic, you're realistic. As a US citizen, even I find this to be bad policy. It will be biased in favor of the USA, and while my government officials may find that wonderful, it's going to result in long-term anti-US sentiment. Afghanistan will be the least of our worries. Not to mention that countries are soverign! Why would they put up with such disrespect?
Well that's a good idea. I am a "fan" of about 10 posters here on slashdot, and I would drop a buck into each of their buckets, if I could. In fact, I am more inclined to give each of them a buck than I am to pay out $5 for myself.
Also, it would be easy and useful for slashdot to use Amazon's donation system. It's a lot like PayPal, but Amazon takes about 10% more or less than PayPal does (I can't recall the rate off the top of my head). I'm waiting for that, as I don't use PayPal.
Isn't that called tying? Is that illegal for a convicted monopolist to do? If they're really saying what you suggested, then haven't they just admitted to breaking the law and wanting to continue breaking the law?
I have just donated another $100 to the EFF. I hope some slashdot readers will join me. There is a link in my sig.
Well, since we're talking about chillingeffects.org, it seems appropriate to quote their FAQ:
...and it goes on from there. But it looks pretty clear to me that these legal experts suggest that copyright infringement steals at least the right of reproduction, if not the right to distribution as well. So you may not like the word theft, but I think it was fine for the original post to use that term.
That may not be a fair question. I'm viewing this on my lunch break at work, and the company has standardized on Windows. But my home is full of Linux & Mac computers. I spent last night using my SuSE 7.3 box: I downloaded skins for XMMS, I surfed to mp3.com and slashdot.org using Mozilla, and played a game of Risk. So what should slashdot count as my "real" computer? My "lunch break" computer or my home computer?
Whichever the content owner decides.
The original comment said that the shareholders will force Blizzard to pursue the DMCA strongarm tactics. I then said that shareholders care about losses from boycotts, so your counter is to suggest that shareholders won't even notice Blizzard's collapse. Which is it? Are they so involved as to force Blizzard's hand or so uninvolved to not care if Blizzard is boycotted out of existence?
Slashdot is media. And it is playing an increasingly powerful role -- you're free to slouch on the sidelines and not participate, but don't expect everyone to come sit and pout with you.
And how long have you worked for Blizzard?
You mean, slashdot's collective ability to protest and cause change was a fluke? What about slashdot's notice that prompted people to write all those letters? There are other situations where slashdot was either a contributing factor in a change, or was the direct cause. Fresh in my memory are other recent things, such as the MySQL debacle and an incident where a company resold modified GPL code without releasing the patches. A quick search through slashdot's own history would show that slashdot has a ripple effect -- it may only be 3000 people that take the boycott plunge, but they'll tell their friends, and maybe get a Web site or 20 to write about it.
Slashdot has become quite effective at making people aware of issues. This seems to have slipped right under the radar of the slashdot readers themselves! We've been bemoaning how we're "just a bunch of geeks" for so long, that we haven't even realized yet that we're now quite a powerful bunch of geeks.
Hmmm. Well, the shareholders I've known over the years have been extremely sensitive to market pressures. If your company is being boycotted, it is very rare that shareholders shrug their shoulders and say, "sorry, the law exists, we're gonna keep doing it, because we can." Hell, even Adobe gave in to pressure over the Dmitry incident. I think qslack is onto something with his/her suggestion to boycott. Losing money is a very imporant topic to shareholders, and if they lose because we had our acts together enough to boycott, they'll abandon their DMCA pursuits quickly. Again, this is only based upon my experience. But I think qslack is right.
Good God. Look at my subject. What a horrible, horrible subject I used. I apologize -- I put "foo" in as a placeholder subject so I could do a preview, and then forgot to change it. I in no way meant it to be "oh foo on Debian" in the grinchy sense. Damn. That probably just painted my entire comment in a light that I did not intend.
I guess I don't need enemies. I have myself.
I think Debian needs a 2.4 kernel as the default if Debian is going to shake its image as hopelessly outdated. For instance, even now you can apt-get up-to-date packages, but most people don't go beyond the defaults. As for me, I go beyond a little: I like to get security patches. Love those. But I'm wary of upgrading other things -- I've tried a KDE 2.1 to 2.2 upgrade that really made my system screwy, and a SuSE 2.4.10 kernel upgrade to 2.4.14 that lost my ext3 functionality. Of course I fixed these things, but I'm wary now. It took time, which is valuable to me. Even with Debian, you can apt-get yourself into trouble. So as someone on the sidelines (well, maybe more than that, I've done a lot of Debian installs), I would encourage the Debian folks to either reconsider the default install, or actively plan for a 3.1 (or even 3.0.1) release that will happen soon after 3.0.
I think you're right. Trying to work with an old 486 or Pentium 1 with 16 megs of RAM will illustrate your coding weaknesses very quickly. It'll make you pull out unnecessary loops, pull out arrays held in memory needlessly, find better/faster algorithms, and so on. We had an app that did a sloppy recursive database query and it took 20 seconds even on fast servers. Switching to a join required some hard thought from 3 people about how to get it right, but the response time now is nearly instantaneous. Maybe one-tenth of a second. And anyone who has played with Perl knows that foreach will read a file into memory, bogging down the system if it has to swap, but using "while" will fix the problem. Simple coding fixes are possible and can give very real, visible speedups. I don't believe that bloat is necessary -- often it is just the result of a developer doing it the obvious way instead of the way that requires someone to sit down & mull it over for 30 minutes.
And don't forget that the Unix way -- one of the catch-phrases that attacted me to the platform -- is "small tools dedicated to single jobs." We're different from Windows in that regard, and that's good. It's attracts people to the platform.
Also in the "works on small/old computers" topic, both SuSE and Mandrake seem to have some activity in this area. It's nice to see them listening to customers a little bit. I buy their boxed products, and really, really want them to speed up & shrink down. Check out my Usenet post about installing SuSE 7.3 on a 32 meg Pentium 1 (summary: it hurts, but it's possible). And for Mandrake, check out this Slashdot article about Mandrake's upcoming super-super-minimal install.
This kind of stuff is near & dear to my heart -- I have spent hours upon hours trying to squeeze installs onto old 486 laptops, mostly. Partly I wanted to learn Linux, but mostly I was just indignant that Windows would install & run okay, so I got very interested in making Linux compete. If you get any Linux working on old boxes, please please please document it somewhere that Google will find you. I'm constantly searching Usenet & the Web for other people's installation experiences.
There are a couple ways to get a modern Linux on your old 386 right now, although getting Red Hat to de-bloat would be very cool. I still use 6.2 on some old laptops because it was a nice, stable release, sorta modern apps, and works fine with 16 megs of RAM. But also look at Vector Linux, which has a 386 & 486 optimized distro with a 2.4 kernel & lots of small recent apps. You can get it on CD too. And also Small Linux, which will run in console mode in as little as 2 megs of RAM, and will do X-Windows with just 4 megs of RAM. The Small Linux kernel is only 2.0, though. But it's very cool to give someone an old 386 laptop with a Web browser, basically restored to some minimal usefulness.
By the way, if you check out Small Linux, you may notice that the home page talks about a .75 release. But you'll find a .81 release available for download. It's definitely improving (my first try with this distro & it just wouldn't even work, but now it actually runs if you're able to follow the instructions carefully).
YES. Your post was ugly & mean-spirited. Slashdot would improve without you.
Good God. If this man can actually duke it out with German bullets, then even I want to hear that story!
You've just defined "tying" which is illegal for a company with a monopoly to do. Since Microsoft has actually been found guilty now, I think the answer to your question is not only yes it should be illegal (in theory), but also yes it is illegal (according to the court ruling).
Not according to the ruling from the court, which convicted Microsoft of illegally leveraging their monopoly to kill or limit competition.
Who decides what the "certain decisions" are that you vote on?